Bell Labs is back!

PORTLAND,
Ore. — Bell Labs has been reborn, once
again aiming to solve the industry's
biggest challenges with focused basic
research associated with application
development. It's celebrating this
turnaround on the anniversary of its
discovery of the cosmic background
radiation from the Big Bang while
pioneering satellite communications
applications.

To cement its commitment, Bell Labs is
also announcing a new annual Bell Labs
Prize for the three most forward-looking
ideas regarding how the technology
landscape will look 10 years in the
future.

Bell Labs pioneered the electronics and
communications industries, earning seven Nobel Prizes.
Memorable Bell Labs inventions included
the antenna that discovered cosmic
background radiation from the Big Bang,
the transistor, the laser, the
charge-coupled device (CCD), information
theory, the UNIX operating system, and the
C and C++ programming languages. In 1996
AT&T spun-off Bell Labs into a new
company that also took over its
manufacturing business, called Lucent
Technologies. Ten years later Alcatel
Research and Innovation merged with
Lucent, resulting in the present-day
Alcatel-Lucent Bell Laboratories.

"People like to say that Bell Labs has
somehow changed its mission or lost its
luster in some ways," Marcus Weldon, the
current president of Bell Labs who took
over in November of 2013 and who remains
CTO of Alcatel-Lucent, told EE Times in an
interview. "But in fact, the thing to
realize is that Bell Labs has always been
at its greatest when it solves big
industry challenges -- of which the Big
Bang is a classic example."

There are many examples that prove Weldon
right. In fact, since the 1930s Bell Labs
has been collecting Nobel prizes in
solving big industry challenges. For
instance, in 1965 AT&T Bell Labs
researchers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson
performed the work that resulted in a 1978
Nobel Prize for detecting the cosmic
microwave background radiation resulting
from the Big Bang.

But in fact, Penzias and Wilson were
actually trying to solve a big industry
challenge in communications. Fiber optics
had not been invented yet, and radio
channels were not able to keep up with the
demand for more communications capacity.
Consequently, they were investigating the
possibility of satellite links as a way of
boosting communications capacity, under
NASA's passive Project Echo balloon
satellite program, and in the process they
detected the first and still most
compelling evidence of the Big Bang --
cosmic microwave background radiation.

Wilson told EE Times:

The discovery of cosmic microwave
background radiation is one of those
serendipitous discoveries which occur
in science more often than many people
think. Using a Bell Labs antenna,
which had been built for satellite
communications, but had properties
which uniquely suited it to some radio
astronomy measurements, Arno [Penzias]
and I set out to look for a halo of
radio emission around our Milky Way
galaxy. We were completely surprised
to find instead that the universe is
filled with radio waves originating
from the Big Bang. [As later
verified by astrophysicists Robert
Dicke, Jim Peebles, and David Wilkinson
at Princeton University.]

Fortunately, the Bell Labs culture
allowed and indeed encouraged us to
seek answers to these things we
couldn't explain. I am amazed and
pleased by how much the science of
cosmology has changed and expanded
since 1965. This has been fueled in no
small part by the abundant information
about the early universe which has
been found deep in the cosmic
microwave background radiation.

Today, on the anniversary of discovering
the Big Bang, and in the shadow of the
original Bell Labs horn antenna in
Holmdel, N.J., which Penzias and Wilson
used to make their discovery, Bell Labs is
hosting a Big Bang Anniversary
celebration. But more importantly, Bell
Labs brass is announcing a return to basic
research and a reemphasis on Bell Labs'
original primary directive -- that is,
solving the world's biggest industry
challenges.